Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that owner Elon Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure”.
Users who try to view content on the platform will be asked to sign up for an account or log into an exiting account to see their favorite tweets.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk said in a tweet.
Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
He added that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
Musk has previously expressed displeasure at artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
“We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” he said.
In a letter addressed to Microsoft (MSFT.O) CEO Satya Nadella, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro in May asked the tech giant to conduct an audit of its use of Twitter’s content, alleging the Windows developer violated an agreement over using the social media company’s data.